Monday, December 28, 2015

I'm
using this post to collect together the articles and papers I have produced for
my Melencolia I series. I will update
this post as I produce written items. I
will be using a link to this post to give access to the whole series.

The errors of the de facto Intelligent Design movementThe de facto ID community represented by the likes of websites such as Uncommon Descent and The Discovery Institute talk obliquely of a mysterious Intelligent Agent being the likely default means of explanation when our understanding of "natural forces" is (currently) unable to account for a phenomenon. Of course, everyone knows that these people are really talking about God and the IDists' studied detachment from theology comes over as an affectation, disingenuous even. Talking vaguely about "Intelligent causes", however, does give a scientific gloss to their work; after all, it is true that archaeology is in the business of separating out the "natural" from the "artificial". Moreover, if ever an obviously empirical situation should arise like that depicted in 2001 Space Odyssey, the question of intelligence and the nature of that intelligence would loom large in scientific circles. So arguably "Intelligent Design" is a little like archaeology and SETI and therefore does have a prima facia claim to being science. But of course we know that the de facto IDists are really thinking theologically and that is where lie their mistakes: They have in fact committed scientific, tactical and theological errors. Their error is scientific because their epistemic filter is misconceived; this misconception leads into a natural forces vs God dichotomy which in turn helps foster scientific blunders such as the claim that evolution is inconsistent with the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Their error is tactical because their pretense at doing science uncontaminated by theology is just that; a pretense and everyone, especially atheists, can see it. Their error is theological because God is both immanent and eminent and therefore He is immanent in natural forces. It follows then that we can seek God in those so-callednatural forces and not just as an ancillary outside intelligent agent; or perhaps I should say that those "natural forces" are in God. For God is the eminent and immanent context of all that his authorship permits reification in the story He tells. The immanence of God means that he is of an entirely different genus to any ancillary intelligence such as man or aliens; if we are theologically turned on we don't expect ancillary intelligence to be a good model for God. In order to maintain a scientific gloss we find that IDists will often try to avoid mention of God in their works. Not only has this tactic miserably failed but I believe it is impossible for the Christian to carry on like this. If we are dealing with immanent intelligence and not just ancillary intelligence this subject cannot be approached without mention of the immanent Sovereign Manager and Creator. That's not a mistake I intend to make myself. My project is explicit about seeking the Sovereign Manager and Creator of our cosmos. I therefore make explicit mention of Him. Also, unlike the IDists I am not making strong claims of doing exclusively science (although some parts will be science) since my epistemology is more broad brush than spring extending and test tube precipitating science. This will mean that any atheist who dislikes the idea of a Sovereign God being at the heart of a study will not find grounds for accusing me of trying to pull the wool over his/her eyes. There is one thing worse than a deceiver and that is an incompetent deceiver who is unaware of his attempt at deceiving both himself and others.So all in all I've become increasingly displeased with the de facto ID movement and their transparent facade of studied scientific detachment. But I'm in good company I don't think Sir John Polkinghorne is pleased with them either. See also: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/why-i-repudiate-de-facto-intelligent.html

My Thinknet Project uses ideas taken from Edward De Bono's book, The Mechanism of Mind in an attempt to elucidate selected aspects of the processes of intelligence. Clearly a complete account of intelligence is well beyond our current science and consequently my terms of reference are satisfied if at least some inroads can be made into the subject.

I'm using this post to collect together the articles and paper's I have generated for my "Thinknet" series. I will update this post as and when I produce written items. I will be using this post as a link to give access to the whole series.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

The question of the nature of Intelligence/sentience presents intellectual traps that are difficult to avoid; not least the problem of a nested regress!

This post on Uncommon Descent is a fine example of how, on the Intelligent Design question, I'm probing an entirely different line of inquiry to the de facto IDists. The post is by Denyse O'leary who quotes one of the ID community's gurus, Robert Marks.

Firstly, setting the scene:

Anything algorithmic can be done by a computer. Give me a recipe for
doing something, and I can whip it up in the kitchen. There are things which
are not algorithmic the most celebrated of which is Turing’s halting problem:
there exists no algorithm able tell whether or not a computer program runs
forever or halts. (The halting algorithm must work for any and all computer
programs.)

But a computer program will halt or won’t halt. But since there is no
algorithm to figure this out, the halting problem is undecidable. We don’t know
before running the program whether or not it will halt. It could run trillions
of years and then halt long after we’re dead. If it doesn’t halt, we may never
know (unless we know the so-called busy beaver numbers which is the same as
knowing Chaitin’s number which is unknowable. But I digress.)

Clearly there are some elementary algorithms where we can prove they halt. However, the tenor of the halting theorem is that there is no general algorithmic procedure which takes any algorithm as a parameter and is then able to determine whether it stops. That is, we may be able to determine halting conditions in special cases, but not in the general case. The halting theorem can be proved by showing that when an attempt is made to submit a hypothetical general halting detection algorithm to itself as a parameter this results in a contradiction. Hence, some questions we submit to algorithms are incomputable. Incomputablilty has the potential to arise whenever an algorithm attempts to flag conditions about itself: Like the well known contradictions arising from Russell's paradox it is not possible for an algorithm in general to talk about itself without raising contradictions.

But I digress. I'm actually more interested in the following quotes from Marks, quotes which bring to light something I've long suspected would be a position favoured by a de facto IDist like Marks. Basically it's another Intelligence-of-the-Gaps sentiment:

Lastly, Roger Penrose in Shadows of the Mind and The Emperor’s New Mind
makes the case the human mind, through creativity and the creation of
information, does nonalgorithmic things (and is therefore not merely a
computer).

This is not unexpected: As I have made clear many times on this blog, IDists like Marks are dualists who see a sharp distinction between "intelligent agency" and "natural forces". This dualism is embodied in the IDist's explanatory filter; This filter ensures that when "natural processes" fail as an explanatory device a default is forced to "intelligent agent". So it is no surprise to find Marks casting around for reasons why intelligence should be classed as an entirely different genus to "natural processes" and fundamentally different. Marks thinks information cannot be created by "natural processes". This is an error in itself which I will be publishing on shortly. However, if you believe "natural forces" can't create information it is a very easy next step to posit that some kind of mystical unknowable process must be creating information and of course that process can only be the apparent inscrutability of intelligence! Wouldn't it be right then if intelligence fits in the category of the non-algorithmic?

I had anticipated long ago that IDists like Marks would settle on Penrose's proposal that intelligence is non-algorithmic. My own opinion is that this proposal is unlikely and I give my reasons for this here and here. All evidence suggests to me that the human mind is finite and therefore the ontology of human intelligence has the same reflexive limitations that give rise to the halting theorem and incomputability in general: Viz: human intelligence is based in a system that can not make certain general statements about itself without those statements invalidating the very conditions these statements are attempting to comment on; there are certain things we cannot know about ourselves. Ergo, human intelligence doesn't step outside the limitations of incomputability.

From my perspective I feel that the de facto IDists are more than welcome to explore this dualist line of inquiry whereby intelligence is categorized as a different genus of process capable of exploring the realm of incomputability; I'm not trying to stop them and I'm happy that they follow this very different line of inquiry; although if they are committed to this view of intelligence they will find progress difficult.

But the polarized dualist backdrop against which de facto ID plays out doesn't favour the intellectual nuancing needed to explain why some people follow one route and some another. Much more in line with de facto IDism's embattled community is the hunting out of fifth columnists and traitors and then hanging them out to dry; as we will see in my next post!

Thursday, December 10, 2015

The de facto IDists I've come across believe the configurations of life have been patched in as might an artifact against a backdrop "natural landscape" and therefore life is regarded as entirely anomalous against the background physics of the Cosmos.

The following post has recently appeared on Panda's Thumb. It's a comment by Nick Matzke on the debate between Panda's Thumb posters Joe Felsenstein and Tom English (FE) and IDists William Dembski, Winston Ewart and Robert Marks (DEM).

However, Felsenstein and English note that a more realistic model of
evolution wouldn’t have a random fitness landscape. Felsenstein, in particular,
argues that “the ordinary laws of physics, with their weakness of long-range
interactions, lead to fitness surfaces much smoother than white-noise fitness
surfaces.” I agree that weak long-range interactions should produce a fitness
landscape somewhat smoother than random chance and this fitness landscape would
thus be a source of some active information.

GAME OVER, MAN. GAME OVER! The whole point of Dembski
et al. invoking “No Free Lunch” theorems was to argue that, if evolutionary
searches worked, it meant the fitness function must be designed, because
(logical jump herein) the No Free Lunch theorems showed that evolutionary
searches worked no better than chance, when averaged over all possible fitness
landscapes.

Emergency backup arguments to avoid admitting complete bankruptcy below
the fold, just so I’m not accused of leaving out the context--------------------------------------------------------FOLD------------------------------------------------------------------.

We disagree in that I do not think that is going to be a sufficient
source of active information to account for biology. I do not have a proof of
this. But neither does Felsenstein have a demonstration that it will produce
sufficient active information. What I do have is the observation of existing
models of evolution. The smoothness present in those models does not derive
from some notion of weak long-range physics, but rather from telelogy as
explored in my various papers on them.

As always, the ID objections to evolution, when stripped of
pseudo-technical camouflage, boil down to “I just don’t buy it because (gut
feeling).”

FE did a good job of demonstrating the plausibility (but admittedly not "proof" as Ewart points out) of the idea that by means of fitness surfaces physics provides the information needed for evolution to occur. Although like Ewart I have reservations about fitness surfaces (doubts which I express here) I don't have an in-principle objection to the notion that physics (even if has to be modified) is implicated as the agency of biological information. This is where I differ from the view of the average IDist. They are likely to have an in-principle objection to any idea that physics could be the providential means by which evolution has been directed (And for standard evolution to work it must be channeled). But for the IDists I have featured in this blog the default view appears to be that the information for life has been patched-in ad hoc by God (and let's make no bones about just what de facto ID really means by "intelligence"). This divine ad hoc activity is not dissimilar to the way the intelligence behind the 2001 Space Odyssey monolith patched-in an artifact on the otherwise "natural" lunar landscape. The 2001 Space Odyssey ID paradigm treats biological structures as bolt on extras in the cosmic scene, extras that can only be explained by the activity of an auxiliary intelligence, much like alien artifacts. This view is at least in part driven by the explanatory filter epistemic. This epistemic leads to a very suspect theology where God works on the natural order rather than in the natural order.

There's not enough information in the above quotes to know whether Ewart's take on teleology leads him away from this god-of-the-gaps ad hocery or not. However, I suspect that behind his rejection of FE's work lies de facto ID's standard false dichotomy of God vs. Natural forces. God works the way he works: If God works through the physics of fitness surfaces (leaving aside my doubts) then that's the way he works and we have to get used to it; I see no point in apposing biologists simply for the sake of it.

Tuesday, December 08, 2015

During the nine years I have maintained this blog I have come across several nice guys; William Dembski and Tim Ventura are a couple of names I can mention straight away. But both these gentleman have ended up being taken for a ride, perhaps in part because they are prepared to give even rogues some leeway: See here and here.

Another nice guy is Paul Davies, professor of physics and science broadcaster. The good professor, although no doubt a very busy and clever man, took the time to reply to an email of mine that I wrote in January 2006 after reading his fascinating book "The Goldilocks Enigma". That brief correspondence can be seen here. Recently. however, the Prof has run into a bit of aggravation because he has been caught discipline trespassing; he has been dabbling in biology!

In his no doubt genuine desire to lend a helping hand and move things along, Davies seems to have been completely and merrily unaware that his efforts weren't really welcome, mostly because he looks to have made a dogs-dinner of it! Davies and myself share an interest in the apparent physical anomaly of life, the question of its origins and also in the enigma of the very particular physical regime that pervades our cosmos; that's why I have avidly read several of his books. However, unlike myself Davies dares to get rather immersed in biological details, details that on his own admission he may not know a great deal about. Wiki quotes him as saying:

I had the advantage of being unencumbered by knowledge. I dropped chemistry at the age of 16, and all I knew about arsenic came from Agatha Christie novels.

So are biologists so incompetent that they need someone who is completely uninitiated into their trade secrets to causally and easily breeze in and show them how it's done? Perhaps they do, but you can guarantee they won't like it anymore than the inhabitants of a spaghetti western town like the arrival of Clint Eastward! Moreover, many biologists are none too keen on what they perceive as physics hubris at the best of times!

Reading his Wiki page we find that typical of Davies very helpful persona he unwisely jumped in to assist Felisa Wolfe-Simon with her radical and risky "Arsenic can replace phosphorus" theory, a theory which according to some should be retracted. That theory seems to be in the Martin Fleischmann, cold fusion league; Farces like this make me wonder what right minded person would want to engage in risky blue skies intellectual endeavors and have a reputation to lose as well as the salary that pays the mortgage!

But for Paul Davies, no doubt a man of independent means, none of this has dampened his enthusiasm for biological dabbling. In his latest move he has taken up theorizing about cancer along with his physics colleague, Charlie Lineweaver. Davies and Lineweaver are developing a theory that cancer is a kind of recapitulation phenomenon where cells revert to an ancient ancestral phenotype; that is, they return to simple cell division and multiplication, the very basic activity of the first life.

The cancer problem has similarities with the problem humanity has had in the search for a sustainable energy source; scientists have worked on both problems all my life and although there have been worthy advances in both areas there have been no panacea catch-all type breakthroughs. The log-jam here has provided a space for the paranoiac cranky conspiracy theorists who feel that someone somewhere must covering up what they know. The twists and turns of devious and fanciful conspiracy theorist logic has no compunction about dreaming up what the imagined Machiavellian conspirators might have to gain from such a cover up; the usual suspects involve control freakery and money making; there may even be an alien or two thrown in for good measure.

So in all in all Paul Davies and his colleague, clever and original thinkers though they may be, are unlikely to find their latest interest a walk-in-the-park between their "real science" (!) of pondering abstruse physics equations! In fact for Davies the walk-in-the-park has already turned into what is more like a walk in Jurassic Park! For none other than PZ Myers has been viciously savaging Davies ideas on the subject of cancer! The general thrust of Myers argument is that cancer is simply a case of corrupt DNA and that can take many forms; cancer is far too pathological, random and bizarre to be identified as a living atavism.

But the even bigger sin of Davies in the eyes of someone like Myers is that he's soft on the religion. He was awarded the Templeton prize in 1995 and overall he tends to be sympathetic toward a religious outlook (See Davies Wiki page and the quote in my picture above). In this connection here's how Paul responded to a question that I slipped in at the end of my correspondence:

My Question: The moral of the story may be that artifacts in one’s perspective have a bearing. As we know, Newtonian dynamics can be developed using the “teleological” looking extremal principles. But, of course, these are mathematically equivalent to the conventional view that sees one event leading to another in sequence without recourse to end results. It is almost as if the choice of interpretation on the meaning of things is ours to make! Thus, perhaps the way we personally interpret the cosmos constitutes a kind of test that sorts out the sheep from the goats! Which are you? Some theists (but not me, I must add!) probably think you are a goat, but then some atheists probably have the same opinion! Can’t win can you?

Paul Davies: I hate being pigeonholed, so I won't respond to the sheep/goats question.

Well, I think they've well and truly pigeonholed Paul whether he likes it or not! Both Christian fundamentalists and evangelical atheists are likely to have it in for him regardless! You just can't win can you? Specially if you are Mr. Nice-Guy!

The above series of posts are an analysis of Joe Felsenstein and Tom
English’s reaction to the work of IDists William Dembski, Winston Ewert
and Robert Marks (DEM for short). Below I publish quotes from Felsenstein’s latest post and as usual interleave them with my own comments. At the start of his post Felsenstein makes it clear that…

FELSENSTEIN: The issue is not the
correctness of their [DEM’s] theorems, but given that they are correct, what
flows from them. Dembski, Ewert, and Marks (DEM) may object that they did not
say anything about that in their paper….

We don’t think that it is a
stretch to say that DEM want their audience to conclude that Design is needed.

Let’s look at what conclusions
Dembski, Ewert, and Marks draw from their theorems. There is little or no
discussion of this in their paper. Are they trying to persuade us that a
Designer has “frontloaded” the Universe with instructions to make our present
forms of life?

My Comment: I think I largely concur with that: As I
constantly say on this blog, de facto ID is essentially God-of-the-Gaps (although
they will deny it), or perhaps in this instance “God-of-the-frontload”. If as
Felsenstein says DEM don’t discuss in their paper the origin of the information required to
generate life that may be because DEM believe the major part of
their epistemic task complete. The epistemic procedure of de facto ID’s
“explanatory filter” prompts a default to “intelligent design” if no “natural
causes” can be found. To this end DEM’s paper has the role of locating an
explanatory gap which they know all too well will be filled in by their followers;
as Felsenstein says: “Are they trying to
persuade us that a Designer has “frontloaded” the Universe with instructions to
make our present forms of life?”But
the explanatory filter epistemic as formulated by Dembski and used by his ID
community has its limitations, especially in theology.

FELSENSTEIN 1. Their space of “searches”
includes all sorts of crazy searches that do not prefer to go to genotypes of
higher fitness – most of them may prefer genotypes of lower fitness or just
ignore fitness when searching. Once you require that there be genotypes that
have different fitnesses, so that fitness affects survival and reproduction,
you have narrowed down their “searches” to ones that have a much higher
probability of finding genotypes that have higher fitness.

2. In addition, the laws of
physics will mandate that small changes in genotype will usually not cause huge
changes in fitness. This is true because the weakness of action at a distance
means that many genes will not interact strongly with each other. So the
fitness surface is smoother than a random assignment of fitnesses to genotypes.
That makes it much more possible to find genotypes that have higher fitness.

In short, with their theorems,
Design is not needed to explain why a reproducing organism whose genotypes have
fitnesses might be able to improve its fitnesses substantially. Just having
reproducing organisms, and having the laws of physics, gets an evolving system
much farther than a random one of DEM’s “search

My Comment: Firstly, there is a good reason why DEM must
consider the whole domain of possible searches. The point of their whole
exercise is to show that whatever be the “search” (or better “process”) behind
the generation of life in our cosmos, then within the full set of possible
Dembskian searches it must be a very special case; that is, it is highly
a-typical. The conclusion, then, is that given the principle of equal-a-priori-probabilities
the cosmic search must be a highly improbable case and therefore of high information. So, I myself can see the point
of this enumeration of the entire domain of possible searches. And yet as I have discussed in the previous
parts of this series Felsenstein is also right; Viz: if one posits a) a
differential in the fitness of possible configurations and b) our particular
laws of physics which smooth out the fitness surface, then it follows that the
cosmic physical regime goes a long way to providing the front loaded
information needed for the generation of life.

However, I must register here my dissatisfaction with the fitness
surface model. In
this post I gave reasons why this model makes implicit assumptions about
the survivability and reproducibility of
the organic structures that respond to the fitness surface. In consequence far more fundamental than the
fitness surface is the mathematical object I call the “spongeam”. This
is a conjectured fully connected but extremely tenuous sponge-like-set in
configuration space. This conjectured abstract structure is defined by the
requirement that it is composed entirely of (organic) forms which are stable and
complex enough to survive and replicate. The point is that these forms need not be very fit, but nevertheless must be fit and complex
enough and sufficiently connected to allow some kind of evolutionary diffusion (by replication) across
the conjectured channels of the spongeam. In fact some regions of the spongeam may
not even have any fitness slopes at all; the fitness could be unchanging across the
spongeam in those regions. In these "flat" regions evolutionary diffusion will be
unbiased although in other regions where fitness changes the
diffusion will be biased. In the latter regions the idea of “sloping fitness
surfaces” will apply. It follows then that “fitness” is not as fundamental as
the spongeam; different levels of fitness may or may not be
superimposed on the spongeam. If Felsenstein is right then it is the spongeam
which is implicitly frontloaded into the cosmos via our physics. The final
twist here, however, is that I don’t think the spongeam exists; therefore neither do
fitness surfaces. (See the post I have already linked to)

Felsenstein quotes Dembski:

DEMBSKI: The term “evolutionary
informatics” was chosen deliberately and was meant to signify that evolution,
conceived as a search, requires information to be successful, in other words,
to locate a target. This need for information can be demonstrated
mathematically in the modeling of evolutionary processes. So, the question then
becomes: Where does the information that enables evolutionary searches to be
successful come from in the first place? We show that Darwinian processes at
best shuffle around existing information, but can’t create it from scratch. [As it turns out this latter statement by Dembski doesn't do justice to the subject as I intend to show in due course - TVR]

I see this work as providing the
theoretically most powerful ID challenge against Darwinian evolution to date.
As for the attention this work has garnered, there has been some, but
Darwinists are largely ignoring it. I’m justified in thinking this is because
our methods leave them no loopholes. We’re not saying that evolution doesn’t
happen. We’re saying that even if it happens, it requires an information source
beyond the reach of conventional evolutionary mechanisms.

My Comment: The first paragraph here basically concurs
with what I have just said: For evolution to successfully generate life there must be some kind of informational “frontloading” (Unless we are to accept interventional
tinkering). Felsenstein is saying that this information is probably implicit in the laws of physics, laws which imply a fitness surface smooth enough for
conventional evolution. Felsenstien might be right (although as I have said I
personally have reservations about this conclusion). Interestingly, Dembski
says We’re not saying that evolution doesn’t
happen and is in effect admiting that evolution could conceivably be tapping into
information from somewhere, perhaps the spongeam. So even if evolution does
occur DEM’s conclusion that a practical and successful search requires a priori information
still applies. And Felsenstein would agree!

You might think, then, that Dembski has got the “materialists” into a “heads I win tails you lose” impasse. But
generally IDists are unwilling to exploit this advantage because lurking in the
background is Western dualism, a dualism embodied in Dembski’s
explanatory filter and which implicitly sets natural forces against divine
intelligent design. It is therefore dangerous for IDists to even admit that
evolution might be sufficiently provisioned with the requisite information (presumably
via the spongeam, perhaps) to do the job; for if they do, then cranking the
handle of the explanatory filter leads to an embarrassing answer. This has the
effect of making “evilution” taboo in the ID community. This
is why in the second paragraph Dembski says:

I see this work as providing the
theoretically most powerful ID challenge against Darwinian evolution to date.

“Yes” and “no” to that Dembski! “Yes” if you are going to depict
“Darwinian evolution” as the straw man caricature of an unguided process, as
do some interlocutors on both sides of the debate. And “No” if one understands,
and certainly Felsenstein understands it, that the “fitness surfaces” which may be implicit in physics, provisions evolution with the requisite directional information.

Before I proceed with the next quotation I need to make the following disclaimer. I don’t accept the habitual
assumption of the de facto ID community that natural processes “can’t create information” and that information
only emerges from the mysterious black box of the so-called “intelligent
agent”. This de-facto ID error is bound up with what is likely to be a
misconception about the nature of probability. In fact my latest work (which I
hope to post in due course) suggests that the creation of information is
exactly the intended role of those so-called “natural processes”.....watch this
space. In an earlier post here I
explore some of the complexities of the information concept which impact this
matter.

Felsenstein also quotes Robert Marks

MARKS: By looking to information
theory, a well-established branch of the engineering and mathematical sciences,
evolutionary informatics shows that patterns we ordinarily ascribe to
intelligence, when arising from an evolutionary process, must be referred to
sources of information external to that process. Such sources of information
may then themselves be the result of other, deeper evolutionary processes. But
what enables these evolutionary processes in turn to produce such sources of
information? Evolutionary informatics demonstrates a regress of information
sources. At no place along the way need there be a violation of ordinary
physical causality. And yet, the regress implies a fundamental incompleteness
in physical causality’s ability to produce the required information.
Evolutionary informatics, while falling squarely within the information
sciences, thuspoints to the need for an ultimate
information source qua intelligent designer.

My Comment: Firstly let me say that the average
reasonably intelligent, yet non-technical Christian will be completely amazed
and fazed by the likes of gurus like Dembski, Ewart and Marks and unable to ferret
out the weaknesses in their position. It all looks oh-so-technically-expert and this in itself is heart-warming and reassuring to the average guru follower
who can connect with the dualist idea that only black-box-intelligence
creates information. And yet there is a deep issue with what Marks says above. Given
Marks’ habituated mode of thought it doesn’t enter his head that in any
practical sense of the word so called “natural processes” can create information. Instead he sees conversation of information working much like energy
conservation. From the perspective of Marks’
dualistic habits of mind it is taken for granted that physical causality is
wholly different from the “intelligent designer”. To him and others in the de
facto ID community the designer is the mysterious and analytically indivisible
entity sourcing information at the end of his information regress. It never
occurs to him to make the connection that perhaps physical causality may be that intelligence at work.

At one point Felsenstein quotes a question by ID supporter Casey Luskin.

LUSKIN: What is Active
Information, and why does it point to the need for Intelligent Design to solve
a problem, rather than an unguided evolutionary process?……..Well, we appreciate the work that you [Marks]
are doing and the papers that you’re publishing analyzing many of these
evolutionary algorithms and asking whether they support a Darwinian view of
life or an Intelligent Design view of life. (My emphasis)

My Comment: If the spongeam and the fitness surfaces
which ride on its back exist, as Felsenstein thinks they do, then "Darwinism" is certainly not unguided! DEM’s work
in fact shows that conventional evolution cannot be unguided. It is ironic that
the B-teams on both sides of the debate err on this notion of unguided
evolution - see here
for example.

Felsenstein quotes Ewart:

EWART: While some processes are
biased towards birds, many others are biased towards other configurations of
matter. In fact, a configuration biased towards producing birds is at least as
improbable as birds themselves, possibly more so.

Having postulated Darwinian
evolution, the improbability of birds hasn’t gone away; we’ve merely switched
focus to the improbability of the process that produced birds. Instead of
having to explain the configuration of a bird, we have to explain the
configuration of a bird-making process.

My Comment: This is certainly true and this is what DEM
have successfully shown. And yet there is a deep implicit issue embedded in
Ewart’s statements as to the significance of his claims. It is on that significance
which the de facto ID movement is going astray.
The ulterior motive behind the above, a motive which is clear to
Felsenstein and myself, is that Ewart thinks he is paving the way for the explanatory
filter to default us to the “intelligent agent”, whatever he means by that. The
big problem, as I will be proposing in my latest work, is that intelligence too classifies as a highly
improbable configuration and this fact points to a major loophole in the
work of the ID gurus.

How does Felsenstein react to Ewart’s statements?....

FELSENSTEIN: This example leaves
it unclear what the “process” is. The reader may be tempted to conclude that it
is the process that models an evolving population. And then the reader may
think that if this evolutionary process succeeds in improving fitness, that
some outside force is needed to set up the process so that it succeeds. But for
their theorem to apply, the processes considered must include processes that
make no sense as models of evolution. Processes that wander around among
genotypes randomly, without being more likely to come up with higher fitnesses.
Even processes that prefer to find genotypes with lower fitnesses. All of those
are among the processes that must be eliminated before we get to processes in
which genotypes have fitnesses, and those fitnesses affect the outcome of evolution.

My Comment: As I have already said DEM have rightly included all
the possible searches in their enumeration and that includes all the highly
disordered searches which practically speaking are fruitless. Disorder, by
definition, has an overwhelming statistical weight and therefore a successful evolutionary
search is a very rare case when set against the class of disordered
searches. Using the principle of equal a
priori probabilities it follows, then, that a practical evolutionary process is
a highly improbable search and this by definition implies a high information
object. But then Felsenstein is also right; he presents a good prima facia case
that physics implies different levels of fitness and a smooth fitness surface, which
is where the information required by DEM lies according to Felsenstein. (Although
I must once again register my reservations about the existence of the spongeam
on which the existence of the fitness surface depends,)

Felsenstein further comments on Ewart:

FELSENSTEIN: In his reply, Ewert
invokes the smoothness of the fitness landscape, and considers the smoothness
to result from “laws or self-organization”

(EWART): *Quote* It is not
sufficient to invoke the three-fold incantation of selection, replication, and
mutation. You must also assume a suitable fitness landscape. You have to appeal
to something beyond Darwinism, such as laws or self-organization, to account
for a useful fitness landscape. *Unquote*

He does not seem to realize that
those “laws” might simply be the laws of physics, and that the
“self-organization” can simply be self-reproduction, something that all
organisms do.

My Comment: Although DEM are right in asserting that any
working conventional evolutionary process must have, a priori, a high information content, it is notable that Ewert
doesn’t acknowledge that conceivably this information could, as Joe Felsenstein
plausibly maintains, reside in the rarity of our familiar physical regime. One might
think that by admitting this as a possibility at least, the IDists could have
their cake and eat it; they could even claim that Felsenstein is admitting the
existence of “active information”! But
no, the de facto ID movement has painted itself into a corner here: For if something
along the lines Felsenstein is suggesting could be satisfactorily demonstrated
then not only would that bugbear of ID, the explanatory filter, stab IDists in
the back, but the whole thrust of IDism, which has been unequivocally against
any hint of “Darwinism”, would make it
look as though they have been defeated. The IDists have fostered the fearsome
dualist spectre that if those loathed “natural forces” are doing the creation
job all along then ID is worsted. Notice Ewert’s reference to so-called “self-organization”,
a vague concept which has yet to produce any substantive input into the evolution
debate. And yet if Felsenstein is right,
the solution could be staring the IDists in the face; namely, that if the requisite fitness
surfaces are implicit in physics then in effect common-or-garden physics is doing the job of “self-organisation”.
(Assuming the existence of the spongeam I must add). Even though this outcome
to the debate would still be consistent with the work of DEM, such an outcome
would cloud the tribal-clarity of the IDists shrill anti-Darwinist rallying
call, a call which appeals to the dualist thinking of every Christian sect
between here and the Watchtower’s Brooklyn HQ.

FELSENSTEIN: It is clear from
these examples that Dembski and Ewert mean their theorems to be read as
evidence for an Intelligent Designer either frontloading the evolutionary
process, or for an Intelligent Designer intervening in it. But Tom English and
I have shown that their Active Information can come about without that. It can
come about simply by having a reproducing organism which has different
genotypes, which have different phenotypes, and these have different fitnesses.
And further Active Information can also come about by the predisposition of the
laws of physics to bring about fitness surfaces smoother than “white noise”
fitness surfaces.

Could that Active Information be
enough to explain the evolution of, say, a bird? Do they have some argument
that further “configuration of a bird-making process” is needed beyond that?
There is actually nothing in their argument that requires that there be further
Intelligent Design

My Comment: Yes, given the work of DEM it does follow that the
generation of life demands frontloading; either that or the ad hoc fiat of
tinkering and intervention. Felsenstein is plausibly maintaining that the mutually
acceptable frontloading is down to physics.
Essentially then DEM and Felsenstein aren’t at odds; for they both see
the need for some kind of frontloading (If not interventional tinkering). But
they disagree over the significance and meaning of this fact. What makes the situation more complex is that
for reasons I’ve already outlined the IDists are unwilling to admit that this frontloading
could be down to common-or-garden physics; they’d much prefer their opponents
to talk of some exotic and speculative “self-organization”, a vague idea which
currently has little real intellectual traction. But for polemical reasons the
IDists are unwilling to entertain the prosaic physics solution; a choice imposed on
them by the dualism implicit in the explanatory filter which excludes any
middle ground in their intelligence versus natural forces dichotomy. The IDists have committed themselves to the
idea that some special ingredient X is needed for life to exist. Felsentstein
says that that ingredient could well be the physics we all know and love. The
IDist is inclined to say “no!” to that because otherwise it would cut across
his anti-darwinist raison d'etre he has fashioned for himself. For the
IDist ingredient X is likely to be thought of as some inaccessible “black box”
intelligence and not mere prosaic physics; to admit the latter would be a terrible
anti-climax to the de facto IDists' 2001 space odyssey message; namely, that they have found an artifact not created by common-or-garden “natural forces”; this is in spite of the fact that even if
Felsenstein is right the IDist still have a case to argue!

The ID community's loathing of "Darwinism", even if it actually doesn't directly cut across DEM's ideas, nevertheless, goes deep enough to cause division within the ID community. See for example this post by Vincent Torley on Uncommon Descent where in
the comments section Torley is accused of supporting “Darwinism”. See
comment 86 where we read: It almost seems as if VJ Torley is turning Darwinist on us. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong. Regardless of whether it is consistent with conservation of information ideas or not as a rule the average right of centre ID follower hates "Darwinism" and can not abide by it.

The added irony is that Felsenstein himself takes for granted the same
dichotomy of intelligence vs. natural forces. Given his outlook on life it is
likely, of course, that he believes “natural forces”, whatever that means, have
done the job of evolving life. Since he has
shown (plausibly) that physics could be the seat of so-called active information,
then his conclusion, as per the explanatory filter, is that intelligent agency
is not required as an explanation. He, like his IDist antagonists, sees it as a
straight choice between natural forces and God. Felsenstein is a dualist in his conceptual categories when it come to thinking about God. As Felsenstein says above: "

But Tom English and I have shown that their Active Information can come about without that", and by "that" Felsenstein means an "Intelligent agent". For him physics trumps intelligence.

Epilogue

Even if Felsenstien is winning the argument this still leaves us with
the question of Why our particular
physical regime with its miraculous fine tuning? For IDists, of course,
this is the work of the God of the Gaps,
but for Felsentstein it’s probably the work of Physics of the Gaps, perhaps some kind of multiverse. But whatever
way we look at it, finite chains of human logic will always leave an inevitable
grand
logical hiatus unfilled. The irrational arbitrariness of an impenetrable
wall of brute fact contingency faces us at the end of our quest for obliging reason;
positing neither physics nor intelligence will rid us of this super gap (But see appendix). Therefore I suggest
we leave it and get back to the thing we do best and that is to describe the
cosmos we have been provisioned with using the intellectual tools the good Lord has
also provisioned us with.

From where I’m standing the results of Dembski, Ewart and Marks are starting to look like a misinterpreted mathematical trivialism, I hope to
expand on this topic in later posts. What ID is missing is that those much despised so-called “natural processes” are actually provisioned, in any practical sense of the word, to
do exactly what IDists dread and fear in their darkest dreams; namely to create information. But then why should
a Christian be surprised at that? God is immanent in his world.

Appendix (Added 21 Nov)

Is there any hope that the finite human mind could ever grasp the
concept of Aseity? Two lines of inquiry respectively from the atheist and
theist camps might be as follows:

Atheistic Aseity: This line or argumentation might be based on
some kind of super-copernicanism; that is, the super-multiverse where all
options are somehow realised, an idea having its strongest form in Max Tegmark’s
mathematical universe. Because everything exists in the super-verse then it
follows that everything has an existence probability of unity. The Shannon “suprisal
value”, that is, the information value of the existence of any particular state
of affairs then sinks to zero. Since the human intellectual demand for
explanation comes in large part from our intuitive sense of surprise as to why particular
things are as they are, then it may be argued that super-copernicanism goes
someway to assuaging our sense of surprise at apparent contingencies; for in the super-verse nothing conceivable is
given preferential existential treatment; the only surprise left is why there
is something rather than nothing. But it might be argued that if everything
exists it is no more surprising than everything failing to exist at all!

Regarding the epistemic question as to why human beings can know
anything at all in such an indifferent and dispassionate universe it might be
argued that in a universe of indifference we aren’t going to be specially
targeted for deception; hence errors average out and we can be reasonably sure
that we can acquire knowledge about somethings
if not everything. To claim that we could know nothing in an impersonal universe is tantamount to the inverted conceit of the
conspiracy theorists who believe that they are being specially targeted for deception. One
thing to be said for Copernicanism is that it seems to be an antidote to the narcissism
of fundamentalist paranoia!

However there are problems with this view: Namely, the
simulation argument and why we know as much as we do; we would expect the universe
to be far more random and unknowable if some form of super-copernicanism held sway.

Theistic Aseity: This line of thought is potentially much more
fruitful to my mind. Early on in my intellectual career I was attracted to positivism;
the general idea that everything swings on observer experience to a high
degree; in fact strong positivism suggests that all else besides experience is meaningless.
Strong positivism is counter intuitive when it comes to in-practice and in-principle
realities that cannot be experienced like the planets of distant galaxies or
other minds. But nevertheless positivism has left me with the general feeling
that without the presence of an experiencing sentience to apprehend it in some way
“reality” is a meaningless and incoherent idea. This view is clearly related to Berkeley’s
idealism. So, if reality is meaningless without a sentient apprehender then the organised high complexity of the cosmos immediately follows: The experiencing sentience
has to be sufficiently complex in order to possess the coherence needed to
cognitively apprehend the cosmos, But since coherent human observers are composed of the very stuff of the cosmos, then it follows that the cosmos must be sufficiently organised and complex to support the human sentience that apprehends it. When human's describe the cosmos they are in effect describing themselves. I advance a related idea in the
introduction of my book Gravity and
Quantum Non-Linearity. Viz; that conscious sentience is described in its own
terms, much like a computer language compiler is written in the language it compiles.

The foregoing line of thought is essentially the strong anthropic principle. It attempts to show that sentient observers are logically necessary because a cosmos without them is regarded as an unintelligible notion. These prototype ideas on the aseity of sentience may throw light on the aseity of God.

Atheistic visions of the cosmos which are founded on the elementary elemental
such as bits and particles will always face a logical hiatus: Simplicity is
simply too simple to self-explain. (I touch on this idea of elementary
elementalism being unable to self-explain in the following posts:

Monday, November 09, 2015

A fascinating post by IDist V J Torley has appeared on the ID web site "Uncommon Descent". It concerns atheist historian Tim O'Neil. O'Neil is rather worried about the historical naivety of some fellow atheists who are tempted to enthusiastically embrace historical theories that have popular appeal but which actually run counter to the work of the mainstream historians of academia. I can do no better than quote the extract that Torley himself quotes from O' Neil. Viz:

Does the world need yet another blog? Perhaps not, but it seems I do. Back in 2009 I beganArmarium Magnum, focused on history book reviews; mostly of books on ancient and medieval history. Occasionally I’ve strayed from that theme into broader articles on history generally and, in particular, on my pet hate – ideologically-driven pseudo history. I tend to be an equal opportunity curmudgeon when it comes to people distorting history to suit a biased agenda. I’m just as happy to kick an evangelical Christian for tying evidence into Gordian knots to keep the infancy narratives in the gospels of Matthew and Luke from contradicting history and each other as I am to tackle a Holocaust denier. But in the last decade or so I’ve became increasingly aware of and bothered by a particular brand of biased pseudo history: what I call New Atheist Bad History.

This varies from lazy repetitions of popular misconceptions, like perpetuating the myth that the medieval Church taught that the earth was flat, to full blown conglomerations of elaborate fringe theory, like the cluster of fervid and contrived pseudo history that is the Jesus Myth hypothesis. But the list of historical ideas the New Atheists and their online acolytes get wildly wrong is long. Amongst other things, many of them believe:

Let’s get this out of the way now – I am an atheist. I have been an atheist for my entire adult life, I am a former state president of the Australian Skeptics and a card-carrying, paid up, subscribing member of the Atheist Foundation of Australia. I have an online history as an atheist in posts on Usenet groups of yore such as sci.sekptic and alt.atheism that dates all the way back to 1992 and have been an active member of many atheist fora including the old Richard Dawkins forums and of Rational Skepticism. I can state categorically that I have no belief in any God or gods, which is – as we keep having to explain to believers – all that being an atheist entails.

So I often get questioned as to why I take the time to debunk NABH [New Atheist Bad History – VJT] and my status as a “real atheist” is questioned regularly as well. I bother with these topics for two very simple reasons. Firstly, I love history, including the history of religions, especially Christianity. I’m a humanist in the true sense of the word and, as the motto from Terence goes “Humani nil a me alienum puto” ( I am human and nothing that is human is alien to me). Secondly, as a rationalist, I like to take rationalism seriously. So I go where the evidence takes me on history as with everything else. However much an idea may appeal to me emotionally, if the historical evidence doesn’t support it, I can’t accept it. Many New Atheists don’t seem capable of putting their emotions aside and looking at the evidence.

****

The fact is we all connect with heart warming archetypes such as the heroic stand against evil, ignorance and oppression. Sometimes it is a pleasant surprise when we occasionally find such stereotypes in real history such as Edith Cavell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is no surprise that these stereotypes thickly inhabit our fiction and reading about them gives us a feel-good sensation. Trouble is, there is a temptation to read straightforward plots of good vs. evil into histories that are actually far more complex and more in line with the shades of grey and the internal conflicts with sin which we all experience (see Romans 7). It is therefore no surprise to find at a closer look many a real history cuts across simple story book interpolations. In particular, O'Neil is anxious to critique some atheistic oversimplifications which depict Christian history as black vs. white scenarios where Christianity is always portrayed as being on the side of backwardness, ignorance and oppression. Need I say that life is very unlikely to be that simple or that in harmony with our taste for kitsch and romantic story lines. Historical reality is much more muddled and grey.

O'Neil singles out evangelical atheists Larry Moran and Jerry Coyne in their all too ready acceptance of historical renditions which feed their biases. Atheists who line themselves up for nice stories giving them a heart warming feeling of self-endorsement are simply displaying a very human response; in fact it is very reminiscent of what the religious fundamentalists also do; namely, wrap feel-good narratives around the gritty and muddy realities of true life

So I can't be too hard on Moran and Coyne: As a Christian I keep tabs on Christian communities where imaginative just-so stories and clinquant gimcrack are very real temptations. At worst this leads to endless conspiracy narratives and apocryphal stories which do the rounds in Christian circles. So, I think I might have an inkling of how O'Neil feels about being let down.

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.